The Jerusalem Issue: How Romney Hit the Third Rail of Mideast Diplomacy

The candidate's call to acknowledge what anyone can see is Israel's capital is far more complicated than it seems, and a microcosm of the crucial but difficult role that the U.S. plays in securing peace.

Mitt Romney speaks in Jerusalem. (AP)

There is a spot in Jerusalem zoned and ready for the American embassy.
It's on Hebron Road, south of the Old City and on the road toward
Bethlehem, waiting for the day that the United States will move its
diplomatic headquarters from Tel Aviv to Israel's self-declared, de
facto capital.

Mitt Romney, visiting Israel over the weekend,
suggested he might try to make that day an early one. "A nation has the
capacity to choose its own capital city, and Jerusalem is Israel's
capital," he told CNN. "Our embassy would be in the capital." The comments made news
and sparked controversy even though he took a much softer line that have other Republican
presidential candidates who insisted they would move the embassy on the
first day of their presidency. "The timing of that is something I would
want to work out with the [Israeli] government," Romney said.

The
Israeli government sits in Jerusalem, but there is not one foreign
embassy here, a conspicuous break with standard diplomatic practice of
housing your embassy in a country's capital. Romney's comments hit on a
long-running complaint from hawkish Israel supporters, and something
that would seem painfully obvious, at least on the surface: how is
America supposed to support Israel if we can't even bring ourselves to
acknowledge what any observer can see is the Israeli capital? But, as is
often the case with Israel, even this seemingly simple question is
fraught, contentious, and freighted with the history of the
Israel-Palestine conflict. In a way, it's a microcosm of the conflict
itself, and the delicate path that the U.S. must walk if it wants to
oversee peace.

The issue of America's one-day embassy in
Jerusalem is so thorny that, in May of 1998, then-Speaker of the House
Newt Gingrich threatened to publicly rebuke Jerusalem Mayor (and future Prime Minister) Ehud
Olmert for nearly forcing Gingrich's hand on it, according to an Israeli
expert on Jerusalem issues named Danny Seidemann, elements of whose story were reported
by the Associated Press at the time. Gingrich had planned to visit the
proposed embassy site with Olmert and to lay a cornerstone, a sort of
virtual groundbreaking and purely symbolic gesture of Gingrich's
aspiration to move the embassy from Tel Aviv. But the White House talked
him out of it, according to the A.P. Instead, he
took a bus tour of the city with Olmert; when the bus passed by the
embassy site, Gingrich conspicuously avoided even turning his head to
look. Seidemann, citing an American consular official whom he says was
also on the bus, claims that Olmert had diverted their bus at the last
moment toward the embassy, where a number of reporters were waiting,
apparently hoping that Gingrich might visit the site anyway. When the
famously pro-Israel speaker of the House realized what was happening, he
allegedly warned Olmert against stopping the bus, pledging to tell the
assembled reporters that he had been brought there against his will.

There
is an immediate reason why the U.S., like every other country on earth,
refuses to put its embassy in Jerusalem or to officially acknowledge it
as the capital city, and then there is a deeper reason.

On the surface, it's because Jerusalem's status is still
officially undetermined, has been for decades, and is ultimately up to
Israelis and Palestinians to decide. Both Israelis and Palestinians live
in Jerusalem and both claim it as their capital city. In theory, there
is a relatively straightforward solution
to this: the city would be divided between a Palestinian capital in
East Jerusalem and an Israeli capital in what is now West Jerusalem,
plus a handful of areas where mostly Israelis live. But actually getting
there is supposed to be part of "permanent status agreement," or a sort
of catch-all grand bargain between Israelis and Palestinians. In other
words, it's not officially the Israeli capital or the Palestinian
capital, under the terms of the peace process, until both Israelis and
Palestinians agree to the division of the city. Moving the U.S. embassy
to West Jerusalem would declare that the U.S. sees it as the official
Israeli capital, which would break the terms of the peace process. It
would also be a unilateral American move, in what is supposed to be a
process led by Israelis and Palestinians, not by outsiders.

But there's a deeper reason that has to do with America's role in the
Israel-Palestine peace process, and with what makes that role so
valuable and important. The U.S. is unique in its ability to bring both
Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table. It gives a lot
of aid money to both sides, spends a lot of time talking to both, and
has worked hard to maintain credibility with both. (Yes, a number of
countries can claim greater credibility with the Palestinian side, but who
else has America's leverage with Israel?) The U.S plays mediator, and
its value as a mediator of the Israel-Palestine peace process is
incumbent on its respect for that process and for both Israeli and
Palestinian concerns.

Unilaterally moving the American embassy would circumvent and thus
discredit the peace process, would ostentatiously privilege the Israeli
claim to Jerusalem over the Palestinian, and "would undermine the United
States' role as a fair broker," Seidemann told me. "This would be
perceived as a loss of [American] stewardship over the peace process."
It would also "put [the U.S.] out of sync with the existing and
potential forces of moderation in the Arab world" that are willing to
accept a divided Jerusalem, forgoing some Arabs' untenable demands for
control over the entire city. Maybe this is why Gingrich, a hawkishly
and sometimes quite aggressively pro-Israeli Republican, refused to even
mount a symbolic cornerstone in the American embassy site.

Still, some U.S. political leaders who wish to aid Israel have long
pushed for moving the American embassy to Jerusalem as a way to affirm
their support of Israel's claim over the city. But it's their insistence
on doing it unilaterally, and in a way that conspicuously avoids
acknowledging Palestinian claims over the city, that would make it
problematic. In 1995, Congress almost unanimously passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act,
which mandated that the State Department must move the embassy by June
1999 or lose half of its funding for building and maintaining its many
foreign offices. Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have all refused to
implement the law.

The U.S. can't acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel's capital because the
city's status is still to-be-determined, according to the peace process,
which also makes clear that it's not America that gets to do the
determining. Unilaterally moving the embassy there would, in a sense,
declare that the U.S., the single most important arbiter of the
Israel-Palestine peace process, no longer takes that process seriously.
After all the work to get Israel and Palestine to follow the peace
process, why would the U.S. want to so deeply subvert it?

Maybe most telling are the practical problems of unilaterally moving the
American embassy to the divided city of Jerusalem. Do you declare West
Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, then go ahead and declare East
Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital? That's not really a position you
hear from American proponents of moving the embassy. They tend to say
one of two things: either, as Michele Bachmann did in her presidential
platform, that the U.S. "Will fully recognize Jerusalem as Israel's undivided capital,"
implicitly rejecting Palestinian claims to the city's east and urging
full Israeli control, breaking from America's role as the arbiter of
peace to one of enforcing Israeli dominance; or, as Romney did in his
comments, by simply not mentioning east or west at all. The latter,
after all, could be heard as nothing more than a non-controversial
aspiration for peace.

In actual execution, it's easy to see Romney's position as consistent with
Obama's, and with that of every president before him: we'd love to move
our capital to Jerusalem, just as soon as the Israelis and Palestinians
can agree on the city's peaceful and mutually acceptable division. But
this was plainly a trip meant to highlight differences between Romney's
Israel policies and Obama's, and it's not hard to hear the old
pro-Israel dogwhistles for an immediate and unilateral move. It's
difficult to imagine a President Romney actually going through with that
-- after all, he left himself acres of wiggle room in his statement.
But the mere fact that he made his statement and so carefully is a reminder
of the remarkably fine line that American leaders must walk between
diplomacy and advocacy, between crowd-pleasing politics and more
hard-headed foreign policies, between supporting Israel's policies and
supporting a peace process that is ultimately in the country's
interest.

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